The Memory Kitchen

A chef recovers the foods that Turkey forgot.

Musa Dağdeviren (right) in the kitchen at his restaurant Çiya Sofrasi. Photograph by Carolyn Drake.

To get to the restaurant Çiya Sofrasi from the old city of Istanbul, you take a twenty-minute ferry ride to the Asian side of the Bosporus. On a cold Monday night last November, a friend persuaded me to make the trip with him. The place was pleasant but unremarkable, with a gray tiled floor, wooden tables, and no tablecloths or printed menus. There was a self-service bar with meze priced by weight. Hot dishes were dispensed at a cafeteria-style counter by a hatchet-faced man in a chef’s hat.

The first sign of anything unusual was the kisir, a Turkish version of tabouli, which had an indescribable freshness and suddenly reminded you that wheat is a plant. The bitter edge of sumac and pomegranate extract, the tang of tomato paste, and the warmth of cumin, which people from the south of Turkey put in everything, recalled to me, with preternatural vividness, the kisir that my aunt used to make. Likewise, the stewed eggplant dolmas resembled my grandmother’s version even more intensely, somehow, than those dolmas resembled themselves.

Food, I should clarify, has never played a large role in my mental life. I enjoy a good meal as much as anyone, but I get so confused by nutritional, budgetary, ecological, ethical, aesthetic, and time-management concerns that I often subsist for weeks on instant oatmeal and multivitamins. Having read Proust, and also neuroscientists on the direct connection from smell and taste receptors to the hippocampus, I have long been aware that eating is, for many people, an emotionally and mnemonically fraught activity. But, that night at Çiya, I viscerally understood why someone might use a madeleine dipped in tea as a metaphor for the spiritual content of the material world.

Overwhelmed by the kisir and the dolmas, I wondered if the explanation lay in my past. Both my parents were born in Turkey, but I hadn’t been back for more than four years. I hadn’t gone to my grandmother’s funeral; I had been holed up in my apartment in San Francisco, writing a dissertation chapter about Proust—Proust, who wrote so movingly about losing a grandmother! Now, belatedly returning to my parents’ homeland, I found myself not on the Black Sea, where my grandmother was born and buried, or in Ankara, where she lived, or in my father’s home city of Adana, where my aunt still lives. Instead, I had come to Istanbul, a city with which I had many romantic associations but little practical experience. Perhaps the meze reminded me of an irretrievable time when my aunt and my grandmother had cooked for me, and I had been where I was supposed to be in the world.

As the meal progressed, the tastes grew stronger and more varied. One inscrutable salad contained no recognizable ingredient except jewel-like pomegranate kernels, nestled among seaweed-colored, twig-shaped objects and mysterious chopped herbs, nutty and slightly bitter. A stew uniting beef, roasted chestnuts, quince, and dried apricots in an enigmatic greenish broth tugged at some multilayered memory involving my mother’s quince compote. I kept looking around the room for some clue to what was happening. Half the tables were empty; near us sat a few Turkish families, a handful of lone diners with books, and two Italian backpackers. There were some restaurant reviews on the walls, and a portrait of Atatürk, and a shelf with a row of jars bearing handwritten labels—“Dried Quince,” “Pickled Deer-Mushrooms,” and many terms I didn’t recognize, which I copied into a notebook.

At the end of the meal, we were served glasses of a pale-green herbal tea, the taste of which we couldn’t quite place. In the window was an array of marvellous, doll-like desserts. Candied tomatoes, dull-red translucent disks, resembled ancient talismans. Miniature candied eggplants had a troublingly sentient appearance, inky and squidlike. Kerebiç—round cakes with pistachio filling—were served with a gooey sauce. My friend thought it might be whipped cream; I thought it was some kind of high-end marshmallow. Finally, I asked a waiter. He said it was made from “the pulverized root of a local tree from Antakya.”

Back home, I hit the Internet. I learned that the jars contained such substances as milk thistle, gallnuts, pickled wild capers, hyssop, and mahlep (a spice made of ground cherry stones). I learned that the green herbal tea was made with thyme leaves, and that the food at Çiya exercised a violent effect on all kinds of people, not just bad Turkish granddaughters. One article described the reaction of “an eighty-five-year-old auntie who noisily burst into tears saying, ‘This is the dish my grandmother used to make,’ ” and a man in his seventies who was transported back to a meal he had eaten at the age of five. Tapping into a powerful vein of collective food memory, Çiya was producing the kind of Turkish cuisine that Turkey itself, racing toward the West and the future, seemed to have abandoned.

Variously described as a “laboratory of Anatolian cuisine,” an “ethnographic museum,” and “the garden of lost cultures and forgotten tastes,” Çiya is the creation of Musa Dağdeviren, a forty-nine-year-old chef from southern Turkey, who has masterminded an ambitious project to document, restore, and reinvent Turkish food culture. Since 2005, he and his wife have been publishing a quarterly magazine, Yemek ve Kültür (“Food and Culture”). Each issue includes a section titled “Seven Forgotten Folk Recipes,” collected by Musa during periodic forays that have taken him from the Balkans to the Caucasus, and during which he has rescued from obscurity various wild greens, sausages, yogurts, and cheeses. In Erzurum, he once discovered a forgotten kind of doughnut.

I met Musa a few weeks later, on a rainy December morning. He was wearing a wool sweater over an oxford shirt, and reading glasses hung from a cord around his neck, making him look like someone’s good-natured Turkish uncle. Solidly built, with a vigorous black mustache, he projected both shrewdness and a complete lack of guile.

Musa was born in the provincial city of Nizip in 1960. He sometimes slips into a southern Turkish accent, replacing “k” with “g.” His father, who grew olives and pistachios, was an ethnic Kurd, but Musa doesn’t identify himself as half Kurdish. His culinary motto is “Food has no ethnicity, only geography,” and his writings contain many diatribes against the claims of various groups to have discovered or invented certain techniques—claims that he thinks represent people’s need “to find reasons that they’re better than others.”

Musa began working in a lahmacun bakery belonging to an uncle at the age of five, sweeping under the racks of cooling loaves. “It’s a job for children between the ages of five and seven,” he explained. “After age eight or nine, they can’t fit under there.” Today, when he walks through Antep or Adana, he can recognize the children who work in bakeries, because of the burned flour between their toes. I asked whether children ever got burned. “It happens,” he said. “I have scars.” He seemed about to roll up his sleeve, then changed his mind.

When Musa was twelve, his father died in a car accident. His mother was left to bring up six children herself, and Musa, the youngest, left school and started working, full time, in restaurants owned by his uncles. He describes his mother as his first master chef. She taught him to make vinegar, pickles, dolmas, noodles, and mumbar—sheep intestines stuffed with ground meat or liver, onion, and bulgur or rice. Musa told me that, a few years ago, when his mother died he went back to Nizip and stayed with a nephew, whose wife made a traditional springtime dish of fava beans and eggs. “When I tasted it, that’s when I realized that my mother was dead,” he said. “I realized that I was never going to taste that dish again the way my mother made it. The person who makes the food—his physique, his soul—is unique. It’s like fingerprints, or handwriting.”

Musa came to Istanbul in 1979, at the age of nineteen. For the next eight years, he worked his way up through various Istanbul kitchens. In one essay, discussing the education of a Turkish chef at the time he entered the profession, he describes a fifteen-to-twenty-year climb through a rigid hierarchy, from errand boy to dishwasher, from apprentice to chef, and on to head chef and master chef. (Today, most of his employees are culinary-school graduates, but he still makes them start by washing dishes and peeling vegetables.) Around year six, a dishwasher either gets promoted to apprentice or remains a dishwasher forever. The apprentice learns his craft by studying the chefs—some of whom, however, deliberately resist study. If a clever apprentice tries to deduce how many eggs went into a dessert by counting the eggshells in the garbage can, a still cleverer chef, fearful of competition, takes to grinding all his eggshells into a powder. Masters also test apprentices by giving them absurd instructions. Musa once saw an apprentice, on a master’s instruction, put a whole sheep into a pot to boil with some beans.

A few years after opening his first restaurant, Çiya Kebap, in 1987, Musa married one of his regular customers. The Dağdevirens, who have one daughter, now run three restaurants: Çiya Kebap, Çiya Kebap II, and Çiya Sofrasi. Çiya Sofrasi opened in 1998 and specializes in regional home cooking (sofra means “dining table”). There is a wide gap in Turkey between restaurant food—grilled kebab or fish, and meat pastries like börek and lahmacun, all of which are typically prepared by men—and the food that people eat at home: stews, pilafs, and dolmas, typically prepared by women. Until recently, it was difficult to find home-style food in restaurants. Perhaps this disjunction explains some of the cathartic experiences of Çiya customers. “Sometimes one of them will start crying, and it spreads to other tables,” Musa said.

For the past ten years, the Dağdevirens have been receiving lucrative offers to open restaurants in the trendy Beyogýlu and the touristic Sultanahmet neighborhoods, on the European side of the city, but Musa refuses to open a restaurant where he can’t personally drop in every night—so the three Çiyas occupy a single block on a narrow pedestrian street in Kadiköy’s market district.

One Wednesday in late December, I joined Musa for an excursion to Kandira, two hours east of Istanbul, on the Black Sea coast. The region is particularly rich in small villages, whose residents bring their food products to town to sell at the market every week. We drove through the bustling town center, past a school and a field where children were playing soccer. Small farms lay on either side of a dirt road. The market occupied a vast area under a yellow-and-white canopy. Inside, the canopy was supported by bright-blue scaffolding, from which light bulbs were strung on wires. Musa was looking primarily for foraged herbs. “There are forty or fifty women who gather them in the villages, and sell them here. They transform their poverty into riches. The people have adapted to the geography. They know how to make sweets using syrup from the inside of tree bark. They can make soup out of the buds of trees.”

He held up a bunch of greens. “We call this snake’s pillow, or snakeweed, or heathen’s beet,” he said. He tore off a leaf and handed it to me. It tasted fresh and not unpleasant.

“No, don’t chew it!” he shouted. “Spit it out! Spit it out!”

I furtively deposited the half-chewed leaf in a nearby pile of detritus. My mouth was filled with a burning, numbing sensation.

“It’s actually a poisonous plant—you can poison someone with the roots, but it makes a delicious soup,” Musa said. “The leaves will burn you if you eat them raw. That’s a joke I like to play on people.” People on whom he has played this joke include Carlo Petrini, the creator of the Slow Food movement: “He liked it so much he bought a big bag of it to take to Italy to give to his friends.”

I asked Musa about his relationship with Slow Food. “I like Petrini,” he said. “His values, his way of thinking are similar to mine.” But Turkey has its own branch of the Slow Food movement, whose adherents he is more skeptical of. “They go to villages and they find regional ingredients, but what do they do for the people?” he said. “Maybe the region has good honey, but its ovens are bad, or its schools are bad, or its roads are bad. What’s it like for the person who lives there? If you don’t keep the person alive, the honey will die, too.”

Musa also expressed concerns about various aspects of fine-dining culture. “If you ask for olive oil, suddenly there appears some kind of a dégustateur with three different bottles, telling you, ‘This is from this region of France, that is from that region of Italy,’ ” he told me. “We have an expression to describe people like that: ‘He’ll paint his own mother and sell her back to his father.’ ”

We made one round of the wild-greens sellers. Most were women, wearing bright flowered head scarves, oversized wool cardigans, and long skirts or baggy pantaloons. Musa asked their names, and how many people had worked to gather the greens, and how long it had taken, and how much they wanted per kilo. Most of the other buyers were women, and Musa, with his air of courtesy, familiarity, and botanical expertise, struck a discordant figure. As he talked to the sellers, he pointed out to me the best products and the best prices. There was a particular discrepancy between prices of corn poppy, whose Turkish name, gelincik, means “little bride.” “It’s a relative of hashish,” Musa explained. “It’s hashish’s grandfather.”

After a second circuit, during which he bought a total of thirty kilos each of borage and mallow, seven kilos of corn poppy, six kilos of curly dock, and twenty bunches of watercress, Musa seemed to relax. He made some sundry purchases: buffalo-milk yogurt and two kinds of honey, one made with chestnut and linden flower, the other with chestnut and rhododendron. Near the beekeeper’s table, a farmer was selling live turkeys. There were seven or eight of them sitting on a row of crates, occasionally nodding their heads and gurgling, like members of a jury. In Turkey, the turkey is called hindi (“Indian”) and is often roasted on New Year’s Eve, which was two days away.

“Do you have any females?” Musa asked the turkey farmer.

“Females, yes, females and males.”

“Which ones are females?”

“Well . . . these are males.”

“I don’t want males.”

“There’s some more turkeys in the back.”

We followed the farmer to a parking lot, where some more turkeys were standing in a trailer. “Some of these are female?” Musa asked.

The farmer scratched the back of his neck, and picked a turkey up by the feet. “Here’s a good bird,” he said.

“It’s a male, isn’t it?” It gradually emerged that these turkeys were males, too—the females were all back in the village.

“We’ll get something to eat now and then we’ll go to the village,” Musa said, adding that the difference in taste between a male and a female turkey is as big as a mountain.

For lunch, we walked to the town center, which Musa described as “authentic,” his highest term of praise. There were three busy commercial streets, whose businesses were all local. “There aren’t any streets like this left in Istanbul. Look, they have a simit oven, and no Simit Sarayi.” A simit is a pretzel-like ring of bread covered in sesame seeds. Simit Sarayi (saray means “palace”) is a ubiquitous Turkish chain whose owners have plans to expand into Europe. “They sell what I call pastane simit”—a pastane is a French-style pastry shop—“and now that’s what people are used to,” Musa said. “In the old days, every region had its own way of making simit. There’s an incredible variety of simit, and it’s all being lost.”

Personally, I rather like Simit Sarayi, the Starbucks of simit: it has ubiquity, high turnaround, reliable quality, standardized service, and clean rest rooms, whereas a local simit bakery is usually a small dark room with an oven and a window. You have to interact with a stressed-out baker, and, if you come at the wrong time of day, the simit are cold and rock-hard.

I asked why it was good to have, say, fifteen regional varieties of simit but bad to have fifteen regional varieties of olive oil. Musa said that the olive-oil varietals were marketed just to make a profit, whereas the simit arose naturally, as a function of regional differences.

“What if a boutique simit bakery starts reproducing the fifteen regional varieties of simit and selling them to rich people at a markup?” I asked. “Is that good or bad?”

“Well, of course, those things happen. That’s capitalism. Everything is being commodified. But what I know is this: when big corporations become involved, it’s never good for quality.

“Look at what happened to gazoz,” he added, alluding to an indigenous carbonated soft drink. Musa’s article on the subject, “Don’t Touch My Gazoz!,” is an elegy to the golden age of the republic, when every city in Turkey, intoxicated by the introduction of carbonated beverages from Europe, hastened to invent its own local soft drink. “Every region gave rise to its own gazoz, known by its own name,” he writes. “Each region’s gazoz was unique, and was made with the water from its own soil.” Izmir’s gazoz, Cincibir (pronounced “gingibeer”), was flavored with ginger, Nigýde’s with raspberry. The glass bottles came in different colors and shapes, and were objects of beauty. Musa describes the “terror and curiosity” with which he and his childhood friends experienced their first gazoz-flavored burps, and the pleasure, as an adult, of arriving in a new city, visiting its tea garden, and sampling the gazoz, whose flavor became inseparable from the memory of the place itself. Today, the Turkish gazoz market, much like the American cola market, is dominated by two corporate brands: Uludagý (once a regional gazoz maker, and now a national soft-drink giant) and Çamlica (part of the Ülker snack-food empire). Both have an amorphously fruitlike flavor reminiscent of Juicy Fruit gum.

Musa paused outside a fish shop, where piles of silver anchovies and reddish-gold mullet lay in bins of ice. Noticing a folding table in the back, he suggested that we go in for lunch. As the owner fried an enormous portion of fish, I contemplated the problem of gazoz. Some of the old brands are, in fact, being resurrected, but of course the golden age described in Musa’s essay is fundamentally irrecoverable. It’s difficult to see any future for gazoz other than corporate distribution or, perhaps, elevation to a niche commodity sold by specialty stores. And it would be hard to imagine Musa viewing with delight the appearance, in expensive tea gardens, of dégustateurs trained to advise diners on their selection of gazoz varietals. But, out of a similar impasse, Musa created Çiya: an idyll that owes its existence to his seemingly impossible expectations.

The shop owner brought the fish, which had been fried in cornmeal. Musa ate in moderation, but with quick, restless, almost peremptory movements. Finally, pushing his plate aside, he began to tell me about the Ottoman houses of Safranbolu, a five-hour drive to the east; formerly a vibrant mess, they had been cleaned up for tourists, and are now a UNESCO World Heritage site. “Nobody lives there anymore—it’s all pensions and hotels,” he said. “You might go to a place like that once, just to see it, but you won’t go back a second time.” The moral of his story was that “the moment you say, ‘Hey, let’s revive this’—no matter what it is—it’s finished.” This is exactly the paradox that Çiya has avoided. “The people’s” lost food is rescued not only from disappearance or mechanization but also from foodie fetishism. The restaurant is an ark in which every tiny species is salvaged, represented, preserved—but still alive, changing, and growing.

Musa, who read Hegel as a young man, sees the plight of food culture in Marxist terms. The forces of industrialization and commodification have alienated people from what they eat, and labels like “organic,” while seeming to offer the promise of overcoming alienation, end up as yet another market-imposed barrier between people and food. Musa’s parsley suppliers, a family who have been growing parsley from their own seeds since 1909, recently asked him how they could go about making their product “organic.”

Musa’s magazine writings, full of veiled polemics against obliquely identified opponents, revolve around these problems. His monograph on keşkek—defined in the dictionary as “a dish made by slowly boiling well-beaten wheat, together with meat”—is less about boiled wheat than about a process unfolding over a certain geography. Musa has identified twenty-four regional names for keşkek, which may be eaten at funerals or weddings, on New Year’s, Muhammad’s birthday, Easter, or Ramadan; in the Turkish bath, during rain prayers, or in honor of special guests. In some villages, keşkek is cooked at home and eaten with walnuts; in others, villagers bring their keşkek to a communal oven that is operated only seven days a year. Keşkek is sometimes cooked in vats with pickle juice, or, like rice, with chickpeas and cumin. “There are dishes without wheat that are still called keşkek,” Musa writes. He later told me about a kind of dessert keşkek, made with dried fruit instead of meat. The facts of the dish, resisting definition, turn out to be almost incidental. What really interests Musa about keşkek is that it embodies a living series of social functions.

In one rather strange passage, Musa exhorts the dish to defeat the spectre of culinary fusion: “How can we deny you, how can we ignore you, O keşkek!” he writes. “No matter how many wits there are who call you ‘risotto,’ you always knock them dead with your true meaning.” Musa despises fusion, a concept that, in his view, treats culinary traditions not as living processes but as finite objects to be manipulated in the name of creativity or revolution. As Musa sees it, keşkek risotto is the invention of someone who can’t fathom the incredible richness of keşkek, and thinks it needs to be given a Western twist.

“Our people are ashamed of themselves,” he remarks, alluding to Turkish chefs’ penchant for Western cuisine. “They have a complex. Go to Iran—you’ll find characteristic Iranian regional cooking. Here you open a book called ‘Modern Turkish Cooking,’ and the first recipe is for risotto.”

The other side of this shame, he continues, is false pride, which recently gave rise to an “Ottomania” fad, with restaurants claiming to serve the dishes of Sultan Suleyman’s court. There are, he says, no surviving recipes from Suleyman’s court: “People just want to think that they’re the descendants of kings.” Musa is particularly outraged by people who claim that their ancestors invented various foods. His latest historical work debunks the origin myth of döner kebab, the rotating roasted meat that forms the cornerstone of Turkish street food: a chef called Iskender is supposed to have invented it in Bursa, in the eighteen-sixties. Once, at a symposium, Musa met a descendant of Iskender. “He was talking about how his ancestor, who was born in 1848, invented döner kebab,” Musa told me. “He had no sources. He was just going around saying this.” Combing libraries, used bookstores, and flea markets, Musa found döner represented in an 1850 engraving and an 1855 photograph. “I wanted to ask that guy, ‘So your grandpa invented döner when he was two years old?’ ”

After lunch, we drove with the turkey farmer and his wife back to their village, which was called Bozburun. On the way, Musa bombarded the couple with questions. Were they Manavs (a formerly nomadic Turkic people)? They were. Did they have keşkek? They did. Did they prepare it at weddings?

“No,” the woman said.

“Yes,” the man said. “At weddings and on henna night.” (A bride is traditionally decorated with henna the night before her wedding.)

The questions continued. Did they bake bread with potatoes or flour, with packet yeast or their own yeast? What did they eat at weddings and at funerals? What kind of mushrooms did they pick? How did they make pickles?

We turned onto a dirt road that led to the village.

“Foreigners live in that house,” the woman said suddenly, pointing out of the car window.

“Foreigners? Where are they from?”

“Istanbul. They were born there, and then they came here.”

We reached a small green farmhouse. In front stood a stone oven, where (using packet yeast) the family bakes its bread. We proceeded along a driveway, muddy from recent rain, to the back of the house.

Behind the house lay a patch of hilly grassland, near a creek. Turkeys were wandering everywhere, producing their strange ambient gurgle, under the lugubrious eye of a large German shepherd. Musa pointed out the four female turkeys he wanted. The farmer’s wife handed the first one to her husband, who bent down and swiftly cut off its head with a sharp knife. A loud wheezing came from the stump of the neck, which emitted irregular spurts of blood. The dog stood up slowly and ambled over.

“Hoşt!” the farmer shouted. This is a Turkish word used exclusively for the purpose of chasing away dogs—there are different words for chasing away cats and poultry—but this dog did not respond. Finally, the farmer tossed the turkey’s tiny head some distance away, and the dog went off to look for it. The farmer’s wife handed him the next turkey.

The other turkeys seemed to view these developments with mild concern. Those which had been walking in the direction of the creek casually changed course and walked elsewhere, with one exception: a stately male, with a red wattle and an enormous fan of back feathers, marched pompously, deliberately, almost sinisterly before the scene of carnage. “What could he be thinking?” Musa asked.

When all four turkeys had been killed, the farmer wiped the blood off his hands. He, his wife, their twelve-year-old daughter, and Musa began plucking the birds. I decided to join them. I had never defeathered a bird before. The turkey was still warm and twitching; its bare skin felt eerily human. Plucking all the turkeys took an hour. The farmer charged Musa about five dollars a kilo, which seemed like a good price, except he insisted that each bird weighed ten kilos. To me they seemed to be about six kilos. “More like four, not counting the bones,” Musa said, in the car. “But they were nice people, and this way you got to see authentic village life.”

On the drive back to Istanbul, we took a scenic route through the countryside, so we could stop by a property that Musa had recently bought in order to realize his long-cherished dream of a Turkish culinary institute. The idea was to provide a center for Turkish food culture: a school, a library, a research institute, and a publishing house. Above all, Musa wants to see the history of Turkish cuisine chronicled in print. “We need records,” he said. “The French have them, but we don’t. Our first cookbook, the ‘Melceüt Tabbâh’in,’ was written by a doctor—not a chef—and published in 1844. The French had books on French cooking in the sixteen-fifties. In the seventeen-fifties, they had a book on bourgeois cooking. We didn’t even have a bourgeoisie, and they already had books about what the bourgeoisie ate.

“Our history is such a mess. It’s like an Arab’s hair,” he continued. “That’s what we say when something is tangled. You’re right, that’s not a good expression—it’s offensive to Arabs. Here’s a better expression. A camel was asked, ‘Why is your neck crooked?’ The camel replied, ‘What part of me isn’t crooked?’ You can’t pick out the mistakes anymore, because mistakes are all there is.”

“That’s a great expression,” I said. “Although maybe offensive to camels.”

“Why should camels be offended? It’s the objective truth. The camel said it himself. That’s the difference between the camel and our food historians. The camel sees himself accurately.”

By the time we reached the property, night had fallen. We came to a pair of imposing metal gates and Musa rang a bell, several times, to no effect. Banging on the gates with his fist, he began shouting to someone called Ismail. Then he picked up a rock and started beating it against the metal. After five minutes of this, the groundskeeper, who is hard of hearing, appeared, bowing and apologizing. “I must have fallen asleep,” he said, unlocking the gate.

Inside, rows of fruit trees stretched into the gloom, interspersed with plots of furrowed earth that will someday be a living encyclopedia of Anatolian plant life—Musa is currently negotiating with various Istanbul universities to found a seed bank here. The school will offer joint degree programs and master classes. A mansion loomed before us, and Musa stopped the car, leaving the headlights on. As we walked toward the mansion, I became aware of the presence all around us of enormous, shadowy formations, which proved to be topiary animals. A monstrous dolphin reared on its tail in the middle of the circular drive, and, in the murk, I thought I could make out a stag and a bear on the lawn.

“The guy we bought the land from— he was really rich. It was his hobby to cut the bushes like that,” Musa explained. “I told him he could keep doing it if he wanted. I think he’s been back a few times.”

Entering the mansion, he switched on the electric lights and, one by one, rooms materialized around us. Musa told me his plans for a library, a reading room, a kitchen with stations for students, conference rooms, lecture halls, editorial offices. There would be guest rooms for visiting scholars and writers. He and his family would live on the top floor. He showed me a spot he was considering for his desk, in a window overlooking a giant topiary alligator. Back downstairs, he lingered a moment in the front hall before turning off the lights. Everything dissolved again into darkness, and we got back in the car to return to Istanbul. ♦